


Horror of Solomon

by JoshTheWitch



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Gen, and yeah, blame a friend for this, daud gets revenge, daud is angry, daud was in the academy, this happened, were doing an rp
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-25
Updated: 2018-09-25
Packaged: 2019-07-17 08:31:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16091897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JoshTheWitch/pseuds/JoshTheWitch
Summary: Daud finds a stray, she's stolen from him. But that is the least of the problem. Solomon, the man who bought Daud's stolen item, has another thing coming.





	Horror of Solomon

**Author's Note:**

> Thank my friend again. She's seriously an enabler.

Lord Solomon is not stupid, in fact, he attended the Academy of natural philosophy for a few years. They tell him he graduated. He understands that stealing such a delicate book will be filled with consequences. So he has pulled strings. Left the thief with so much proof he is certain the assassin will cut her head clean off. Put the pathetic thing out of her misery. He has even debated on paying the assassin to kill her himself, see the horror on his clothing when he returns. It would be a wonderful sight… To see her blood on the assassins gloves. 

He misses the gore of the academy.

And of course, since he is a smart man, he pays for more guards. For arc pylons and walls of light. If the assassin does not end her poor life, that thief will be back once she sees the mess that little journal is causing. Then maybe he will see the gorey end personally. Execute it personally. He, however, does not think she will pass through the new protections to his office. A sadistic man can dream. 

From his office window, he can see all of the legal district. His domain, stolen from the Timsh's. That granddaughter worked for him now, a servant. If she’d known all this would happen maybe she would not have hired the assassin to kill her uncle. Or perhaps, she would have hired him again at the slightest threat. She has the ambition and motivation for it. It could be hers again. 

She tidies his desk regularly. She has seen the journal, seen his scratching as he decodes it. Sees the decoded work, and knows who it belongs to. Her heart races. All she has to do is tell him it is here. The servants mutter over an offered reward for sly women that seem to appear in thin air in the women’s clubs. And the men talk of brutes with scars and tattoos slamming bodies into walls demanding for a book. Leather, whalebone spine, it can sing, if you believe it can. Touched by the outsider, everyone murmurs. 

Her master spreads some of these rumors. Small things. The lord protector has seen the outsider. The lord protector is the father of the Empress. Daud's men are touched by the outsider. There are men and women in his ranks. Locations of whalebone fragments and places the whales sing the loudest. 

Then they grow larger. More gruesome, outlandish. Just plain odd and nonsense. 

Dealings with dead men exposed to the air. Dead counters that were paid to miss a few bodies. Descriptions of masks no one can discern. Lists of names. The servants find out many of the names were children’s. Those sent to be overseers. Suspected to have not passed their trials. 

It is all odd. Everyone that hears them wonders why they are spread, and continue to spread them in hopes of finding out why. Bar fights start over them. Tattooed bulls and marked up slippery eels fight for where the rumours started. A name. A place. No one knows. Well, some do, but they fear to lose their position. 

Lord Solomon can see where it is all headed. No sign of the thief. The gangs and assassins riled into edges. It will all come to a head. All be over and he can come forward as the one to expose it all. 

Come forward as the one that exposed the lord protectors connections to the knife of Dunwall. Tell dripping details of encounters the pair have had. It all sounds like music. The courts will call for Attano’s head. Bring him into the courts, it will be glorious for his family. His children will have a chance at the Empress. He will be a father of an emperor! 

Lord Solomon is so focused on what may be ahead of him that he would have missed the signs of what to come. If there were any. 

Even Talia Timsh did not see a sign of what was to come. Not until it stood in front of her dropping coins into her hand. Hand over an office key. That is all she needed to do. Hand the key over. So she did. The still glinting key landed in a well-worn whaler’s glove. Each digit closing around it like it was the key to life itself. Talia walked away richer that day. Richer and with the knowledge that her employer would walk the empire for only a short time longer. She reports her key missing before scattering off to her home. It is too late in the day to call a locksmith. So the lock goes unchanged into the night.

The night is calm. Barely a breeze through the open window. Not the stir of offbeat watchmen. Even the clocks tick in perfect time. A fire roars and crackles, spilling the smell of exotic woods through the office. 

With being a smart man, Solomon has placed a pair of guards at his office doors. Not a chance for the thief. Not a chance for anyone. The journal will stay safe and locked away in his drawers. 

Or it should have been. 

His desk is untouched, each paper perfect, each book placed away. Even an ink blot is untouched. All is well until he tosses books and papers around the room in search of the journal. The notes. Any of it! All of it is gone. Vanished.

“Looking for this?” Solomon’s head jerks up and what he sees causes his heart to skip a beat. His hand comes up to his heart. 

A silhouette. Each line crisp. Someone, a muscular, bulky man, is sat casually on the window sill. The journal in his hand as if it was nothing more important than a dying cigar. It dangles between his fingers, so nearly falling from them. Solomon can tell he is not even being looked at, the figure is staring straight ahead, into the wall. 

Before a single word or sound parts Solomon’s lips, the figure has moved. He is not even sure if he blinked, but now as the man stalks towards him he scrambles for the light switch. When the light flickers on, the figure is gone. Leaving no trace. Solomon throws open the door to his office. The guards stand before him. At their post. Each light flickers as usual. The windows are closed shut. Shaken by his encounter, and unwilling to believe it is something to do with the building or a ghost, he goes to his room. He just needs sleep. Excitement and stress are getting to him. That is all it is. 

It cannot be the building. Even with the rumour of Arnold Timsh having been haunted by a living ghost. There is no chance it is true. All false words to trick the blind, The ignorant and stupid. 

His breath still shutters as the doors to his room are pulled open. Everything is fine. The lights do not flicker like those in the hall. The fire is burning. His papers and chests are all locked. He changes into his nightgown and places his day clothes away. He turns around to face his bed. 

There it is again. The figure, only now, in full colour. He feels death in his lungs. A blood red coat drips down the man like a slit belly. It is the only colour on him, the rest looks like dead flesh. Even his face, sunken and scared. And his eyes… 

Solomon stumbles back, knees hitting his chest of clothes. The man walks forward. Pulling a whaling blade from his hip. It dances over his fingers, catching the light and reflecting it through the room. Closer and closer, that blade dancing with his fingers. 

Words stumble through Solomon’s mouth, catching on his teeth and tongue. He is no holy man, but he is praying. Moving back further he falls over the chest, back hitting the floor behind it. Weight comes over him. Hard bone into his sides and a blade so sharp it cuts his skin with its presence rests on his neck. The face of death himself hovers inches from his. He can smell his breath. Karnacan cigars. Black eyes burrow so deeply into his own they must be able to see his thoughts. 

“Never make bad with a witch.” The words sizzle in the air, Solomon can swear he sees smoke. But when the breath hits him, it is ice. He closes his eyes with the sting of it. But when he opens them, there is nothing. 

It is like time starts up again. His guards run into the room to inquire about the loud bang. Only to find him on his back over the chest. No one else in the room. They make certain the shaken man is sleeping before leaving the room. 

When he wakes, it is as if the night before was nothing but a nightmare. His papers and books are back in place. Even the journal is back in the locked drawer. There is one thing to tell him it was somehow real. The thin line over his throat. 

It had gathered blood in the night. Beading up and drying. It came off with the touch of his fingers and did not come back. So, with the brush of his fingers, his final proof disappears. 

A week ticks by hour by hour for Solomon. He waits for anything more. The week eases him. A night of madness was all it was. 

Only, then, the shadows start. He catches them in the corner of his eye. Quick moving figures. Dark as night. 

They bring back thoughts of those pitch black eyes looking into his soul. Rotting it. Frequent and intelligent they know how to just stay in vision, but out of it enough to be blurry. They jump and duck, he swears the ones in his office and room hiss curses at him. The shadows run on for days. Bringing them up with servants, guards, colleagues tell him no one else has seen them. It is only him. He dreams of the eyes. 

Dreams of leather-clad hands tearing his heart from his chest and crushing it. Of watching the blood spill down into an inky blackness. They are filled with that ice cold voice, he can feel it on his neck, taunting him in a language he has never heard. 

The dreams haunt him in his waking moments. The shadows have stopped, they no longer daunt him from just out of sight. For that he is glad. He was not sure if he should drink more or less. 

A moon passes with no true threat. He sleeps lightly due to the nightmares and jumps at flashes of shadow from rail cars. The book stays on him, hidden in a pocket. He feels for it constantly. Pulls it out to be sure it is there, flips through the pages, counts them. One hundred fifty-six and a half all written on. 

Though, as he flips through it this time, Late into the night in front of his fireplace, something new has appeared. It is simply his name. Edward Solomon. It is crossed off, like so many others. All dead and buried. 

His heart stops, and he looks up from the journal at the smallest change of light. The man in the coat stands before him once more. That blade dancing through his fingers. His eyes black as tar. Breath like ice.

Then his heart truly stops. 

The whaling blade slides through Solomon’s chest like it is eel jelly.


End file.
